


Steve Misses and Missed

by Sassaphrass



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Culture Shock, Drabble, Gen, New York City, Post-Avengers (2012), Steve Feels, Steve does not like your future, Steve tries to deal with things, sad Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:09:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassaphrass/pseuds/Sassaphrass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Avengers, Steve considers the future and all the things that he missed in the last 70 years. Drabble, with a side of lonely Steve angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steve Misses and Missed

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Fist fic posted to Ao3! Yay! 
> 
> Also, first fic in the Avengers fandom, but there's more where this came from!
> 
> This is just me playing around with the idea of the things that Steve would really miss or regret having missed in the last 70 years. It's not beta-ed, so any constructive notes would be greatly appreciated!
> 
> Now, Angst ahoy!

Steve has pretty much decided that he doesn't really like this future. Well, it's the present but, it's not his present.

There are lots of wonderful things of course. They've certainly ironed out the kinks in hot water heaters, and these antibiotics are amazing. Not to mention the whole ' _There's now_ _a cure for polio and TB_ ' thing. He likes the way the way the women are all bold, and the modern hairstyles they wear. He likes Buddy Holly and the Beatles, and Bruce Springsteen.

It's the little things that really bother him though. He misses the smell of stale cigarette smoke. He never smoked and Bucky hardly did either, him because of the asthma and Bucky partly because of Steve's asthma and partly because they were so damn poor, but, everyone else did. The bars and dance halls were always cloudy with the stuff, less so after war broke out and there were rations and all, but, still. There were always cigarettes. There was always that stale smell of old tobacco. Now apparently it'll kill you.

He misses the swirling dresses girls wore, their bright red lipstick and the dance clubs with their swing music and their jazz and blues. He misses the roughness and toughness of his New York. Everything in this new one seems to be glitz and glam and high rises. Even Brooklyn seems too rich for his blood these days.

And it's insane. He misses the cigarettes he never smoked and which more often then not gave him asthma attacks, the girls he never bothered to even try and chase, he misses the dances where he never left his seat and the meaness of the city that used to get him beat up every other week.

 

But, more than that he missed....everything. Like... comic books. He used to get paid pennies drawing for some of the cheap ones every now and then, people'd read 'em and toss 'em on the sidewalk, now they're a 'genre' a 'subculture'. He admits he wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when he saw a Roy Lichtenstein for the first time.

And all that art! DeKooning and Jackson Pollock, and Mondrian. German expressionism and New York Pop-Art. Andy goddamn Warhol. Steve is so angry he missed all that.

He missed Rockn'Roll, he imagines how much Bucky would have loved it, They'd have been older then, in their 40's probably with wives and kids (well, if he'd ever scored a dame and Bucky had ever settled down), he can imagine Bucky running over and telling him to turn on the radio because “ _Boy, Steve! You gotta hear this!_ ”

But, maybe they'd have been too old to love it by then (and what's he even thinking anyway? Even if he hadn't gotten frozen, Bucky still would have gotten dead [and that's part of what hurts so bad isn't it? He can't think of any decision he could have made where his best friend wouldn't have died]).

Of course it's not all regret, a lot of it is anger too. Suburbs for instance. He hates everything he's seen and read about those places. He hates television with it's ads and the way he can't understand it. He hates the fast food joints, and the way everything has gotten ugly. He hates the way politics are played now. He hates how cynical people are. He hates how rude everyone is and how hard it is to get someone to look you in the eye.

The people are different now is what it boils down to he supposes. When he went to war he'd been surprised to find that, with the exception of a few brainwashed hydra goons, people were always just...people.

But the people in this brave new world aren't like the people from his.

 

He misses Peggy. He thinks about her a lot. She's the only one still alive. Retired, in England. He could call but what would he say “Hey, still wanna go dancing?”. She'd lived her whole life. He had no doubt it had been an incredible life, because that was Peggy. She wouldn't have let any of it keep her down for long. No sirree. It would take more then a little thing like a world war to stop her. He imagines her railing against repression, fighting the good fight. He imagines her in her fifties screaming about women's liberation and birth control (because she would have). He wanted to be there for all that, instead someone else had been...

 

He likes Tony, though it hurts a bit to think about Howard like that. He's looked up some things on the computer and filled in the rest of the gaps himself. Howard lost a lot of people, Howard lost himself. Howard got cold and angry and mean and had known it. Maybe Steve is glad Howard didn't find him. He thinks that it might have broken his heart to see Howard, who had dreamed of flying cars and the cities of tomorrow, building bombs. He hadn't believed it when he read about what Howard had helped to do in Japan. He'd helped vaporized two cities to end the war.

Steve is angry at a dead man, and he has no right to be. Howard had never loved a fight (one of the many ways he's not much like his son). When he hears that Howard used to say “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.” he understands. Howard also used to say “The best fight is one where no one has to throw a punch” and “the quicker a fight is over the quicker we can get to the interesting stuff.”

He thinks sometimes that maybe he should offer to talk to Tony about his dad. About the mad wild genius he used to know who flew planes across enemy lines for a guy he'd met once and who in the 1940's thought it would be a good idea to design a million dollar shield as an offensive weapon. But, that seems as useless as offering to take Peggy out dancing. Howard may not have died like Bucky (now Bucky had loved a fight, he'd also loved fast women, fast cars and hadn't believed in anything. Sometimes Steve can't help but think Bucky would really like this new world) but he might as well have, the guy Steve had known stopped existing not long afterwards.

 

SHIELD looks after him these days. He's got a little apartment, they handle the stuff he doesn't understand. Get him on remedial tech courses (occasionally with seniors senior citizens who were little kids when he went in the ice), handle the bureaucracy of coming back from the dead after 70 years and see to it that he does something useful with his life.

 

He's trying to catch up on everything but it's hard. There's so much he's missed.


End file.
